18

 18

IT HAD BEEN RAINING for hours and was still dark. Sitting in her car, Luisa watched the red and white lights go past distorted by the rain, and the fixed yellow of the streetlamps. In the factory car park she took advantage of the rain to close the car door quickly and take shelter. Anselmo was more ill-tempered than ever because they were going to have to search in the rain, with nervous dogs and reduced visibility. They both thought about the sodden ground, swelling rivers, and wet clothes that chill a body quickly. But Silvia could be inside somewhere—or at least able to drink something.

The factory where Luisa worked made intimates: vests, underwear, pajamas, socks, and pantyhose. The workers and office employees were all women and they had lockers where they could leave their coats and handbags. When she went into the cloakroom the heads of women fiddling with locks, scarves, or a thermos of tea went up in unison and she prepared to be surrounded.

“Any news?”

“Good heavens, it’s raining today too.”

“Let’s hope she’s inside somewhere.”

“She couldn’t take it, poor thing.”

“Well it’s hardly her fault.”

“Silvia is an extraordinary teacher.”

Luisa nodded politely. She understood that they were genuinely worried and that the constant repetition allowed them to breathe freely. And you couldn’t deny it—it kept them excited, banished boredom. Silvia was the theme of the day. An odd but unassuming woman who had shunned attention all her life but ended up attracting it by disappearing. People were going over various events in her life, her appearance, her commitment, her solitary nature. Luisa understood the paradox and felt it her duty to protect Silvia from gossip, but she was too polite to be effective. Then something made her blood boil.

“Well, it’s understandable. A single person without loved ones?” a woman with backcombed hair was saying: Mariachiara. “She got more attached to her students than she should have. I’m not sure how to explain it. Kind of obsessively. I mean, they’re all she has. And it’s a great thing, right? That sort of teacher. Everyone knows it. But then something bad happens and you go crazy. My mother-in-law knows her well and says she wasn’t quite right even as a girl.”

“Mariachiara!” Luisa cried, and suddenly she was stunned. She should have let it go, but she felt her face burning right up to the tips of her ears and she walked up to the gaggle of women. She never lost her cool; she was in uncharted territory. Over the years, she’d outsourced all her anger to Anselmo. Stupid idiot, she thought, referring to herself as well as Mariachiara. She didn’t know how to get out of this.

“Oh, Luisa. I know. It must be awful for all of you,” Mariachiara hurriedly added, sounding distressed.

Luisa was ready to step backward, offer a conciliatory smile, and start her shift.

“We all love Silvia. I’m only saying—”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing, only that if Fernanda or Bruna had disappeared into thin air, or you, for that matter, I really would be surprised. But Silvia has always been a little unusual, no? In a good way.”

Luisa could smell Mariachiara’s toxic hair spray; her look seemed poisonous too. She spotted white and silver hairs on her black raincoat.

“If you say so,” she cut her off. Fortunately not many were listening. But by that point she couldn’t stop herself.

“Listen, Mariachiara, actually you need to do something about that cat smell. It’s really nasty. I think he’s sprayed your raincoat; you know how they mark things.”

She left Mariachiara sniffing her clothes with a resentful expression that made her ugly.

Sometimes, at moments like those, Luisa asked herself what she was doing there, and by there she meant her life. It wasn’t a nice thing to say, and in fact she didn’t say it—she didn’t dare follow the thought through. She felt as though her children were fully hers. Giulia was sweet as pie and it didn’t seem like she was the type to go badly off the rails during adolescence, so long as Anselmo didn’t become so unbearable that he pushed her to leave with the first moron who came along. Corrado, the little one, was a real pest. Her mother, Gemma, had treated him like a prince since he was a boy, not bothering to teach him things Giulia could do very well at his age.

Luisa could guess where her sense of irrelevance came from, just as she could work out the deep reasons that had led her to marry Anselmo. It was because of what had happened twenty-six years before, during the war. She had heard about people surviving with shrapnel throughout their bodies, actual bullets in their skulls that couldn’t be removed. She saw herself like that: with something inside, or rather something cold and hard at her center that she’d managed to heal over despite herself. Something, however, that had broken her down and left part of her numb.

Luisa was nostalgic for the Friuli of her youth, though she would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to live there. The countryside lay open to the sky without being contained by mountains, an expanse of greens and yellows: tobacco, sweet corn, wheat. For her, mountains had always had a pressing aspect, like a belt that squeezes too hard at your waist. She preferred to have as much sky over her as possible, as far as the eye could see. Friulian polenta was white, a full moon sliced with a length of cotton thread; once cold, it served as breakfast and snack. At dawn, the mist rising from the River Tagliamento rippled images, so that the entire landscape looked like a dream. Luisa had many pleasant memories. But she fell in love during the war in the very worst months of 1944. That was when she’d started to nibble at the skin around her nails, leaving the flesh red, bare, and painful. All of her felt like that, without the necessary protective layer, without the bark. That was why she tore away at her cuticles: to make them more like the rest of her.

Luisa’s family was with the partisans and that made her proud. The boy she was in love with, though, had a brother with the republicans. He wasn’t fascist himself but he loved his brother, a Blackshirt, all the same. The partisans locked him in a barn for questioning: they wanted him to betray his brother or help them to find him—they might execute him or use him as a prisoner exchange. Luisa never knew if they shot him in frustration, in error, or merely on impulse because he tried to escape.

It was the partisans who did it and the entire universe stopped for her. She knew them well: names, faces, and families. The family were often with her—older cousins or friends of cousins, classmates, fishing mates, friends from the army. She’d left sacks of potatoes, new shoelaces, and woolen berets in ditches for them, put on three or four jumpers, one on top of another, and tied them tightly to branches at the edge of the thickets. She’d begged them to get the Nazis out and she continued to do so. If it had been the Germans, at least she could have exhausted herself hating them.

Gemma hadn’t noticed. She’d said, “That’s just how it is right now. We’re all suffering like dogs.” Luisa didn’t have the strength to explain how she felt, and probably not even the words to do so. People hadn’t gotten used to talking about their own pain and no one set much stock by the feelings of adolescents—too flighty and illogical. She had panic attacks called air-hunger. “Luisa is hungry for air,” they’d say, “clear some space. Let her sit down.”

It happened whenever she remembered the last time she’d seen the boy she’d fallen in love with (could she call him “my boyfriend”? He’d declared his feelings, but it wasn’t official and they’d only just kissed). Luisa was walking along the mill path. He was in the kitchen garden at his house, standing on a chair between rows and picking beans, tossing them into a bucket at his feet: plunk, plunk, plunk from his position up high. She hadn’t called out to him; she’d wanted to watch him through the trellis and leaves where she was hiding. Swallows scissored low through the air. The beans were mottled, purple and white.

Later, before she went home, Luisa took a moment by herself to read the newspaper. It had stopped raining, the low, compact layer of clouds had broken apart, and the light was continually changing color from gray to pink, pink to gray. There were various articles about Giovanna and Silvia.

First the tragedy of the child, now the mystery of the teacher.

Eleven-year-old drowns herself, teacher disappears.

Numerous theories, no light on shocking event.

Fears of another reckless act.

On the second page they’d published a photograph of Silvia chosen by Luisa, hoping that someone, somewhere, would recognize her. It had also appeared in La Stampa in Turin. The photo had been taken in the spring and they’d been in a meadow in Bioglio; looking at it, you caught the scent of new grass and sun-baked dust. Silvia was looking straight into the lens, yet even so she gave the impression of being a spectator rather than the subject of the photo. Luisa had had to cut herself out at the side but a slice of her shoulder remained, the crook of her elbow.

Underneath, a long article explained how Giovanna had often skipped school and on the day of the tragedy her teacher, Canepa, had decided to let the family know. “This could be one reason for the suicide and the subsequent disappearance of the teacher. However, both facts plunge too deeply into the dark recesses of the human psyche for the theory to have any validity when considered logically, even in a superficial and makeshift way.”

On the contrary: Luisa believed she understood Silvia. When it had been her turn to suffer she hadn’t run off to hide—but only because she hadn’t felt guilty. Unlike Silvia. If Silvia wasn’t dead and she wasn’t coming back, then she didn’t want to be found.